spleen

notes on spectral poetics

1. It is difficult to find a definition of free verse that doesn't center on what it isn't. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, for example, describes free verse as "the prosody of avoidance of meter." Doesn't tell you much. It's as if free verse's identity is entirely reactive - it's an absence, a negative form. That's an enormous oversimplification of how things really are, but the popular concensus is that free verse, unlike the verse forms that came before it, derives its identity by rejecting previous formal models instead of incorporating them.

 

2. The rejected thing remains. It's revenant, which is to say, it always and again returns in some form. It's spectral, ghostly, a shadow beneath and within the contemporary poem. Previous generations hyper-consciously rejected form; it was necessary for them to do so, because they often had been rigorously trained to write formally. Our generation generally lacks such rigorous training - it's been replaced with an "intuitive" sense of cadence, taught to us over many hundreds of contemporary poems. We are drawn to certain rhythms and sounds as the ones that comfort us, or excite us, or make us angry. We share a popular poetic ear that's considerably different from the ear of a century ago. Often, when someone writes with a century-old sense of cadence, we call it inauthentic, forced or artificial. If that sense of cadence should appear in a line or a phrase within free verse, we detect it as a dead thing, an aural spectre, asserting regularity where our ear expects variation. The poem is haunted by past poems, all the way down to its foundations of cadence and sound, all the way to its spine.
3. It is important to note that our generation's "variation" is the next generation's noise ghost.

 

4. So the poem is a haunted house. The ghost is the formal past, and free verse is the talisman, the vehicle that will release us from the house. Should we escape, or should we hunt the spectre?

 

5. This is a defining aspect of the culture of American poetry. In one instance, contemporary poetry yearns to have the academic and technical machinery of the formal past; in another, it angrily rejects that past and all its trappings. Nostalgia battles nihilism; romance wrestles with real language. No matter who wins, poetry emerges as a kind of formalized machine - if we establish technical machinery, or if we reject the need for such machinery, we set rules for how poems are to be made. We smooth them out, give them guidelines, make them consistent with one another. Make them dull.

 

6. Wanna know what free verse is? I'll tell you. It's a collection of practices and techniques. That's all.

 

7. Everyone who's seen a horror movie knows what happens if you don't escape the haunted house - it devours you and you become part of it. You become part of the haunting.

 

8. Reminder: in this case, the house is poetry.